Shadowing the White Man's Burden

This beautifully argued and engaging literary history addresses a fairly simple question: How did the distinctive multiracial nature of the United States transform that country's sense of itself as an empire? Unlike most other polyglot settler societies, the United States was an ambitious, if slightly tardy, participant in the great expansion of overseas empires in the late nineteenth century. Unlike most other seats of empire—particularly the French, the British, the German, and the Belgian—the metropole in the American case was profoundly heterogeneous, with all manner of peoples and races already locked in a tight domestic embrace. Because of this unique demographic and political reality, Gretchen Murphy writes, “the white man's burden in the United States could never entirely remain the white man's burden” (p. 2). As she tells us, then, it became something else. Her story is interesting in its broader brush strokes and its very particular details. Focusing on the period from roughly the closing of the frontier to World War I, Murphy considers the strategy of “shadowing” the dominant power by mixed-blood protagonists, a trope in contemporary American literature. By “shadowing,” she means not merely following closely, but also establishing a slight distance marked by race or color and exploiting that slight distance when making a critique of empire itself. In doing so, Murphy hopes to provide a nuanced, carefully historicized portrait of the relations among empire, race, and state power, and, building on more than a decade's worth of scholarship in American studies, history, and postcolonial studies, to break down the certainties that have typically framed discussions of imperialism: white over black or brown, colonizer and colonized, metropole and periphery. In this provision, Murphy offers an interdisciplinary text that could redirect historical inquiry, much as Gail Bederman's Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880–1917 (1996) did for a slightly earlier generation, forcing it to better attend to contradiction, contingency, and complexity

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Frontier · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Race (biology · Scholarship · Sociology · Trope (literature · White (mutation · Gender Studies · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society